Cons: Poorly implemented controls, shoddy storytelling, tedious mountain climbing.
Sometimes, late at night, a gamer playing a survival horror game will scream out in fright. But if you hear someone scream while playing Cursed Mountain, they’re not scared; they’re furious.
Story: A Mountain Rescue Told on the Cheap
Mountain seems to go out of its way to put players off immediately with the game’s opening dramatic sequence. Instead of a full cinematic cut scene, or in-game animation, one is treated to a series of murky still images with weird blur effects used in a failed attempt to keep the images from seeming static. The narration that accompanies these images is so tinny that it sounds as though it was recorded through a cheap cell phone, lending new meaning to the phrase, “phoning it in.” Everything about the game screams “LOW BUDGET” except its $50 price tag.
Mountain follows mountain climber Eric Simmons’ attempt to rescue his brother Frank, lost at the summit of a Himalayan mountain while trying to retrieve a valuable relic. As Eric begins his ascent, he discovers the villages at the mountain’s base deserted and strewn with corpses. The corpses turn out to be the handiwork of vengeful spirits who soon attack Eric.
Armed with a mystical staff, Eric is able to vanquish these restless specters. Eric will collect several staffs during the game, although the differences between them are obscure and often inconsequential. Staffs can be used to slash nearby ghosts and fire energy bolts at distant ones. Once a spirit has taken enough damage, players can perform a “cleansing ritual” by waving the remote and the nunchuk in indicated directions. It is also possible to simply keep attacking a ghost until it disintegrates, but the cleansing ritual is quicker and replenishes Eric’s health.
Combat: Great When It Works Well, Which it Usually Doesn't
In the early part of the game the cleansing ritual works pretty well, with a slash or two sending your ghost to the next world in a ghostly explosion.
As the game continues, new gestures are introduced. Mountain begins to fall apart when the players learn a forward thrust motion. My forward thrust failed more than it succeeded, and sometimes I would shove my remote forward four or five times without the game’s acknowledgement before the indicator faded away and the ghost attacked again. Then I would use very foul language very loudly.
Oddly enough, other times I would simply randomly wave the remote and the game would assume I’d made the correct motion. The poor battle controls would probably have made me give up on the game early on if it wasn’t fairly easy. When the difficulty ramped up in the last quarter of the game, the poor controls proved a huge liability.
Presentation: Half-Hearted
At first I found the story incoherent, until I realized that this was in part because I had subtitles turned off. I always turn subtitles off when I play games, but the sound is so badly recorded in Mountain that doing so caused me to miss key story elements. The story is still a bit of a mess, with plot twists coming out of left field and no explanation of why Eric is having visions of Frank or why he has suddenly developed the ability to use his “third eye” to see mystical objects. The storytelling itself is quite poor; using stills instead of cut scenes must have saved the designers a bunch of money, but it makes the game feel cheap and gives the story a disjointed feeling. Games have successfully used still images to tell stories, but Mountain does a miserable job of it.
The poor sound recording, cheaply made dramatic sequences and finicky controls are all examples of the game’s basic sloppiness, which can also be seen in the save system and mountain climbing mechanics. But before I discuss these, let me spend a few minutes talking about the game’s good points.
The Good: An Interesting Setting, Some Nice Moments and Steady Improvement
Mountain is a fairly good-looking game, in spite of a limited color palette, and it is rather interesting to explore Tibetan villages festooned with Tibetan prayer flags (which in the game look like a store’s plastic “grand opening” flags). The Buddhist idols and pots of butter tea give the game a certain exotic appeal. When the controls work the way they’re supposed to, there is something very satisfying about dispatching a ghost with a series of sharp hand gestures.
There are also nice moments, as when ghostly hands reach for Eric from a cliff wall, or the Wii remote is turned into a walkie-talkie through which another climber guides Eric through a series of tunnels. There is also an ingenious though aggravating sequence in which you must navigate while completely blinded by a snowstorm.
The game is set in a series of small areas, which allows players to find their way fairly easily without the use of a map or any directional indicators.
The game feels a little slack at first, but it steadily improves as Eric progresses up the mountain; by the time he is high above civilization, with the snow falling thickly around him, Mountain begins to seem pretty cool.
